Advertisement

More stories

NEW DELHI, Sept 14 — Faster, cheaper internet access rolling out across provincial India is having an unlikely consequence: Matchmaking.

In a socially conservative nation where marriages are often arranged by relatives, mobile connectivity is enabling rural families to go online to find matches from a wider pool of suitors. And that’s boosting demand for cyber services, like Matrimony.com Ltd, Jeevansathi.com and Shaadi.com, which operate searchable databases of marriage material.

With an estimated 450 million mobile internet users, India’s information technology revolution is transforming the matrimonial market, traditionally dominated by marriage negotiators and intermediaries, and ads in newspapers. But online matchmaking services are encroaching.

Revenue from the fledgling industry expanded an average of 21 per cent annually from 2010 to 2015, and will reach 20.6 billion rupees (US$322 million or RM1.35 billion) by 2020, Ken Research Pvt Ltd said in a report last year.

Matrimony.com, which opened an initial public offering on Monday, added three million user-profiles last year, of which 40 per cent were in semi-urban areas. Three-quarters of the profiles added to the Chennai-based company’s database in the quarter ended June 30 were uploaded from a smartphone, helped by cheaper handsets, faster internet connections, and mobile-app enhancements.

In a socially conservative nation where marriages are often arranged by relatives, mobile connectivity is enabling rural families to go online to find matches from a wider pool of suitors. — AFP pic

US$54 billion market

“We expect that trend to continue and those reasons will help more people come onto our platform,” said Murugavel Janakiraman, Matrimony.com’s founder and chief executive officer, in an interview. India’s wedding market, including matchmaking services, venue-hire, catering, decorating and photography, is worth about US$54 billion a year.

“Very recently with the launch of Jio we have seen a huge increase in penetration in the Jio markets,” Jeevansathi.com senior vice president Rohan Mathur said in an interview in his office near New Delhi. “This huge increase in internet penetration is leading to a large number of users coming online.”

That has a compound effect, as more users mean more potential suitors, which attracts yet more users.

The “arranged marriage” system, which is rooted in caste-based social divisions and patriarchy, is undergoing a transformation, according to Sarbeswar Sahoo, an associate professor of sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.

‘Love’ marriages

While “love marriages” are increasingly preferred by younger Indians, the lingering hold of caste and community in India makes it difficult for people to fall in love and marry, Sahoo wrote in a paper published in the Journal of South Asian Studies in June.

“The online matrimonial technologies transgress geographical boundaries and provide more autonomy to candidates in ‘arranging’ their own marriages,” he said. “The new technologies and online matchmaking processes defy the fixed categorisations of love and arranged marriage.”

That’s resulting in “self-arranged” marriages which combine “the best of both worlds,” Sahoo said.

‘No objections’

Md Azaharuddin Ahmed, 30, used Matrimony.com to find Mazda Sultana — a woman from his targeted community, region, and religion — in 2015, he said.

“I went to the website, found her, and my parents had no objections about my choice,” said Azaharuddin, who lives in Jorhat, a city in the remote northeastern state of Assam.

The couple was married last year following a courtship facilitated by an app on his phone. “It’s difficult to carry laptops around, so naturally we prefer mobile phones to be able to coordinate,” he said.

Three years ago, 60 per cent of Shaadi.com’s three million-strong user base was accessing the site via a desktop computer. That proportion has shrunk to 20 per cent, while mobile access jumped to 80 per cent from 40 per cent, said CEO Gourav Rakshit in a phone interview. Rakshit also sees growth coming from smaller, semi-urban areas.

“We are seeing people using wifi connections, shifting to mobiles to access these services, and the levels of access have gone up fairly dramatically,” he said. — Bloomberg